9 mins
Ask a group of golfers to name the best courses in the world and you'll quickly find yourself in the middle of a debate.
Should public courses be ranked separately from private clubs? How much should architecture matter compared to conditioning? Should historical significance influence rankings? Does exclusivity make a course better?
For decades, organizations like Golf Digest and Golf Magazine have helped shape those conversations through their annual rankings. These lists have become part of golf culture.
They influence golf trips, create bragging rights, spark endless debates, and help golfers discover courses they may never have otherwise considered.
They're also incredibly difficult to build.
Creating a meaningful ranking of golf courses requires expertise, perspective, and a tremendous amount of experience. Traditional rankings typically rely on panels of golfers, architects, industry experts, and course raters who evaluate courses and compare them against one another.
It's a proven approach and one that has produced some fantastic rankings over the years.
But as we've continued building TheGrint, we found ourselves asking a different question.
What would a Top 100 ranking look like if it were built from millions of golfers instead of hundreds?
Today, we're excited to introduce TheGrint Top 100 Rankings.
Our goal wasn't to create another version of an existing ranking list. There are already several excellent rankings available within the golf world.
Instead, we wanted to create something that reflects a perspective that has historically been difficult to measure: the collective voice of everyday golfers.
Over the years, millions of golfers have used TheGrint to track rounds, rate courses, build rankings, create bucket lists, and document their golf experiences. In the process, they've generated one of the deepest collections of golf course data anywhere in the world.
TheGrint has accumulated millions of course ratings and tens of millions of rounds played across thousands of golf courses worldwide. That data spans golfers of every skill level, every region, and every type of golf experience imaginable.
It includes golfers playing municipal courses on a Tuesday afternoon and golfers crossing oceans to play bucket-list destinations.
Most importantly, it captures what golfers actually do, not just what they say.
And we believe that's a powerful signal.
One of the challenges with course rankings is that ratings alone don't tell the full story.
That's one of the reasons we recently launched our new Course Rankings experience, which allows golfers to compare courses head-to-head rather than simply assigning numerical scores.
As we discussed in our recent article on Course Rankings, golfers naturally think in comparisons. They don't just ask whether they liked a course. They ask how it compares to every other course they've played.
Those comparisons provide a richer understanding of golfer preferences.
Combined with ratings, rounds played, personal rankings, and other engagement signals across the platform, they help create a more complete picture of how golfers evaluate golf courses in the real world.
The result is a ranking system informed not only by course ratings, but by actual golfer behavior at scale.
We're launching five new Top 100 lists:
Together, these rankings provide a global view of how golfers experience and evaluate some of the best courses on the planet.
Whether you're planning your next golf trip, building a bucket list, or simply curious about how your favorite course stacks up, these lists offer a new perspective grounded in real golfer data.
Traditional rankings often answer an important question: "What do experts think?"
TheGrint Top 100 Rankings aim to answer a different one: "What do golfers think?"
Those questions aren't mutually exclusive. In fact, they're often closely aligned.
Many of the courses that consistently earn praise from industry experts also perform exceptionally well with everyday golfers.
But there are also differences. Some courses generate tremendous loyalty among golfers who actually play them. Some public-access gems outperform better-known destinations. Some courses consistently exceed expectations despite receiving far less attention than their famous counterparts.
Those are the types of insights that become visible when you start looking at data from millions of golfers rather than a small panel.
We're not trying to replace traditional rankings.
We're adding another lens through which golfers can evaluate courses.
And we think that perspective is valuable.
The launch of Top 100 Rankings represents the culmination of several investments we've been making across the course experience on TheGrint.
Our new Course Rankings experience helps us better understand how golfers compare courses.
Our new Course Discovery platform helps golfers find and evaluate courses using golf-specific insights.
And now Top 100 Rankings bring those insights together at a global scale.
Taken individually, each feature serves a different purpose. Together, they represent a broader vision.
We believe golfers deserve better tools for understanding the courses they play, the courses they dream about playing, and the courses they should discover next.
The golf industry has spent decades building systems for measuring players.
We're excited to help build better systems for understanding courses.
And this is only the beginning.
The lists are currently available inside the app only! Open the app and navigate to the COURSES section of the app. There you'll see "Top 100" unlocked.
If you try and open the link on a desktop device, it will take you to a generic login link to the website. The lists MUST be accessed via mobile inside TheGrint App.
Don't have the app yet? Download it from the iOS or Android store!
